The blatant crypto racism is exhibited in most of these posts... Guess what, your reaction is what proves the racism, not your quasi logical statements explaining your reaction...

No one bother to read the opposing views, or the reason why this was brought it.. just an immediate.. " Those women and brownies always want to be included... reverse racism"

To quote a SPEAKER that realized this after the fact

So I started asking around. I thought of all the prominent non-white-dude Ruby conference speakers I could in the space of a couple minutes. Just people who came easily to mind, nobody too obscure. I wanted to know if they had been invited to be part of that initial group of 15, and had said no.

Sandi Metz. Bryan Liles. Reg Braithwaite. Angela Harms. Sarah Mei. Katrina Owen (Norway). Keavy McMinn (Scotland). None of these people were invited to be part of the initial line-up. In fact, I couldn’t find a single woman or minority Rubyist who had been invited to be part of that 15.

Oh.. that changes the picture... doesn't it?

This whole "the world isnt racist anymore so just get over it" is a bunch of BULLSHIT. It's been barely a generation in most areas.. heck, we have people in the south holding to grudges and behaviors 6-9 generations deep. But someone, racist behaviour is supposed to be completely expunged in one generation, and well, any mention of it just shows reverse racism... bleh.. most of the above posters disgust me.

I couldn't agree more. The current economic system isn't ready for what will ( not would ) happen when the service and manufacturing industries are fully automated. ( which is my main gripe against free market types )

Eric Spiegel is CEO and co-founder of XTS, which provides software for planning, managing and auditing Citrix and other virtualization platforms.

This web site at www.xtsinc.com has been reported as an attack site and has been blocked based on your security preferences.

CLASSIC, so much for "smarter white collared developers";)

But I digress...

Look, plain and simple, in the field of software development, education means NOTHING. Why you ask? because unlike true engineering, there are no globally studied curriculums. Now, you may argue about this all you want, but these are facts. CS programs vary so wildly, it's amazing.

Secondly, since most developers don't do any actually engineering, those core CS principles rarely come to play.

That being said, what matters is the individual. There are huge differences from people that went to a tech school 'cause it was cool, someone that went to a top tier school, someone that dropped out ( for any of the reasons ), someone that went to a mediocre schoo, and someone that skipped college and just wanted to speed up their career.

But usually, those differences boil down more so to "candidate pools", and who they "mostly attract".

The good developers, come from all walks. They are the people that go beyond the taught knowledge ( wherever this knowledge may have come from ), and actually understand things from a raw, as close to true engineering perspective as possible, view.

But what do i know, I'm one of those that went to a top tier ivy, EE btw, and then decided to leave on his third year because it was too boring.

So you say its hard to package your software? Most scripting languages have modules that allow you to automatically build rpm or debs. Java and C are also trivial to general.spec or deb definition files. Its at most a few days worth of work for one person, and weeks of work in savings.